If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

I want a broken, buggy POS to power my other desktop, okay, yeah... lol

I guess you are a Gnome user?

Seriously, people using WMs like Openbox instead of KDE usually do that because they don't need and/or want fancy effects or compositing (possibly due to hardware restrictions, possibly due to personal taste). What has Kwin to offer for those people that they should consider a switch?
There are no advantages that I can see.

Comment

Seriously, people using WMs like Openbox instead of KDE usually do that because they don't need and/or want fancy effects or compositing (possibly due to hardware restrictions, possibly due to personal taste). What has Kwin to offer for those people that they should consider a switch?
There are no advantages that I can see.

If you are using Wayland, you are using compositing. So anyone wanting to use Wayland in the future is going to need a compositing window manager.

But beyond that, kwin offers a lot. Scripting, fine-grained control of the behavior of individual windows, window and application-specific rules and overrides, advanced focus behavior control and protection, window tabbing, and tiling. Plus it has the advantage that it is well-tested and widely-used, which saves the work of making and maintaining their own window manager. Further, thinks like desktop effects are modular so they can be easily stripped out.

Comment

But beyond that, kwin offers a lot. Scripting, fine-grained control of the behavior of individual windows, window and application-specific rules and overrides, advanced focus behavior control and protection, window tabbing, and tiling. Plus it has the advantage that it is well-tested and widely-used, which saves the work of making and maintaining their own window manager. Further, thinks like desktop effects are modular so they can be easily stripped out.

All of that do I have already with the i3 WM, but with a lot less resource usage, so I wouldn't see that as advantage, but it is of course to each its own.
It is just that I see no compelling reason to use Kwin instead of one of the other WMs.

Comment

All of that do I have already with the i3 WM, but with a lot less resource usage, so I wouldn't see that as advantage, but it is of course to each its own.
It is just that I see no compelling reason to use Kwin instead of one of the other WMs.

As far as I can find, i3 wm is a dedicated tiling window manager. This at its core makes it much, much, much less flexible than kwin (which can be tiling but isn't required to be). Also, because it is a tiling window manager, there is much less it has to do, so of course it uses less resources. That also means that its scripting interface is extremely limited compared to kwin's. Further, it doesn't seem to have a mechanism to trigger scripts on particular events, rather than just polling (which is an extremely wasteful and likely laggy approach especially since "scripting" seems to be handled by an IPC rather than integrated directly into the wm like with kwin). So there is no way you can write a script that turns w3 into a conventional wm, unlike kwin where the scripting interface for kwin is powerful enough to allow tiling to be implemented as a script.

Comment

As far as I can find, i3 wm is a dedicated tiling window manager. This at its core makes it much, much, much less flexible than kwin (which can be tiling but isn't required to be). Also, because it is a tiling window manager, there is much less it has to do, so of course it uses less resources. That also means that its scripting interface is extremely limited compared to kwin's. Further, it doesn't seem to have a mechanism to trigger scripts on particular events, rather than just polling (which is an extremely wasteful and likely laggy approach especially since "scripting" seems to be handled by an IPC rather than integrated directly into the wm like with kwin). So there is no way you can write a script that turns w3 into a conventional wm, unlike kwin where the scripting interface for kwin is powerful enough to allow tiling to be implemented as a script.

i3 supports floating windows (so it can be used as conventional WM, though that doesn't make much sense), events are indeed limited by default to "window opens", but this can be extended, AFAIK. I never noticed lag, even with complicated configurations.

Anyways, i3 was just an example, because that is the WM I know best. I doubt that there aren't WMs with the same capabilities in the stacking WM croud.

Comment

i3 supports floating windows (so it can be used as conventional WM, though that doesn't make much sense), events are indeed limited by default to "window opens", but this can be extended, AFAIK. I never noticed lag, even with complicated configurations.

Anyways, i3 was just an example, because that is the WM I know best. I doubt that there aren't WMs with the same capabilities in the stacking WM croud.

My point is that it doesn't have close to all the capabilities of kwin, even ignoring all the compositing-related stuff (which again will be a requirement on wayland). kwin is "heavier" because it does a lot more, is much more flexible, is much more extensible, and the stuff that is i3 also has is much easier to handle in kwin (for example a gui for handling window-specific rules, the ability to download scripts for you off the web, or scripts being through a real API rather than relying on special-purpose IPC and bash). And those capabilities are exactly why someone would want to use kwin.

Now if you could point out a window manager that actually has the same capabilities as kwin but is lighter-weight than your argument would be valid, someone would probably want to use that over kwin. But i3 is not it, and a stacking window manager with the same capabilities as i3 would also not be it even it existed.